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1. The (not so) Great Malayan Road Trip
Monday, January 02, 2006 10:11 PM My uncle decided one fine day that it would be a good idea to spend New Year's day visiting our great Grandmother (my father's father's mother) who resided in Mersing. Since none of us could come up with a better idea, about half of my father's side's extended family woke up about six hours after a huge chunk of our government's money was vapourized like fireworks all over the island so that we could meet at a certain hawker centre in Bukit Timah to start a two-hour long journey to Mersing. Basically, the itinerary of the day was to drop by a distant uncle's shop, and to visit the homes of another distant uncle (where the matriarch lived) and a granduncle. Seeing the sparse neighbourhoods of terraced houses surrounding a small and short (lack of tall buildings) 'town centre', the words 'laid-back' and 'slow-paced' inevitably crept into my mind. Quite interestingly, the difference in environment seemed to produce (somewhat subtle but noticeably) different outcomes in the behaviour of the young children (below 10 in age) in our (big) family. I couldn't help but feel that them children had a very jarring 'Kampong' naivete; a lack of certain social skills; a certain village gullibility and vulnerability that you seldom see nowadays in the young children in our city. Globalism has not invaded Mersing yet. They're not like us Singaporeans, who're already so integrated and 'connected' into the internet and the mass media and all, we've sort of lost our innocence. And freedom. (the Malaysians fix up their own satellites to receive 'Astro' Channels, their version of our SCV, and sometimes, other types of international channels, something which we don't have to, and cannot legally do... *cough* censorship) And of course, there was the grand old matriarch, who was so visibly aged. She was really bent double, and could hardly walk, hear, see nor remember. She kept ranting on and on (translated from Hokkien to Chinese, and summarized for me by my uncle) about wanting to burn coats for her oldest son, my grandfather (who's passed away many years ago before his time was up), and her own demise, even though they kept trying to change the topic. I suppose, when you sincerely believe that you're one foot in the coffin, many things don't matter anymore, and only death and the afterlife do. I wondered how I could've comforted her, or if there was any way to truly do so.
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